I wore the mask as long as I could, which was about half an hour. It was unpleasantly reminiscent of an operation I once had, the details of which I would set down here if I had time. Without it, I found, I could see things much more plainly. Through strong field glasses the British trenches were discernible. The German front line was behind a ridge, two hundred yards away—from the British, not us—and invisible. No drive was in progress, but there was the steady boom, boom of heavy guns, the scary siren, with a bang at the end, of grenades, and an occasional solo in a throaty barytone which our captain told us belonged to Mr. Trench Mortar.
The firing was all in one direction—toward the northeast. Fritz was not replying, probably because he had no breath to waste in casual repartee.
Convinced that our hill was a zone of safety, for this afternoon at least, I wanted to stay up there and look and listen till it was time to go home. But our captain had arranged a trip to a sniping school, and our captain would rather have broken his monocle than have made the slightest alteration in the program for the day.
To the sniping school we went, and saw the snipers sniping on their snipes. It was just like the sniping school I had visited at the American camp, and I got pretty mad at our captain for dragging us away from a sight far more interesting. But he redeemed himself by having the major in charge show us real, honest-to-goodness camouflage, staged by an expert.
We were taken to a point two hundred yards distant from a trench system.
“Standing up in front of one of those trenches,” said the major, “there’s a sergeant in costume. He’s in plain sight. Now you find him.”
Well, we couldn’t find him, and we gave up.
“Move, Sergeant!” shouted the major.
The sergeant moved and, sure enough, there he was!
“I had him spotted all the time,” said The Doctor.